A great reason to have cross-experience at the management level is to understand the different motivations of the two roles: * devs are incented (paid) to intro

A great reason to have cross-experience at the management level is to understand the different motivations of the two roles: * devs are incented (paid) to introduce changes to the system...mostly in the form of new features. * sysadmins are incented to stabilize the system and make it scale. In organizations with uncoordinated or siloed management, this leads to infighting... sysadmins try to stop "troublesome" devs from making changes at all and actively slow down changes in the name of stability and developers at the other extreme try to get changes in without caring about stability and blame sysadmins for that. Great management with experience in both will find ways to incent the teams to introduce regular change while maintaining stability.